Each year, credit card companies lose significant amounts of money due to credit card fraud in cases where thieves use stolen credit cards to enter into fraudulent credit card transactions. The number of such fraudulent transactions can greatly be reduced through the use of authentication methods for ascertaining that the requester of a credit card transaction is, in fact, the owner of the credit card.
A first approach that is used to enhance the security of credit cards comprises demanding the signature of the requester and comparing it to the signature on the back of the credit card. However, this method is inefficient because it requires the exercise of a high degree of scrutiny by the sales clerks responsible for the signature verification. Such degree of scrutiny is often unattainable due to a variety of factors, such as the large number of signatures the clerks have to compare each day.
A second approach to enhance the security of credit card transactions is to associate a cell phone or another “responsive object,” which is a portable object that is capable of providing location information about itself when queried, with a credit card owner and then to compare the location of the object—and, therefore, of the collocated credit card owner—with the location of the point-of-sale terminal every time a credit card transaction is requested.
This approach can be very effective when the responsive object has the necessary signal reception to be able to determine its location, such as when the object is able to detect multiple Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. However, when the responsive object is in a place where it is unable to receive location-related signals, such as inside a motor vehicle, the approach can fail. Similarly, the approach can also fail in situations where the location-tracking service is unavailable due to it being disabled or lacking coverage in the particular area where the point-of-sale terminal is located.
Therefore, the need exists for an improvement in the ability to monitor and report on the location of a responsive object, as well as on addition state-related information of the object, without some of the disadvantages in the prior art.